Several years ago, I got shot at with a pellet gun while traveling down the highway during rush hour in St. Louis. The air conditioner on my Blazer was broken so I had the window down and my elbow on the sill when I heard a loud “Smak!” against the doorframe just a couple of inches behind my head. I thought I’d been hit by a rock kicked up by a car in the left lane and just kept going. Later, when I got home, I looked at that doorframe and found a perfectly round pellet-sized crater about 1/8 of an inch deep in the steel. Paint was chipped out, of course, making a stark silver contrast against the navy blue finish of the truck. I drove a short way to a police station and asked the cop at the desk what he made of it.
“Looks like somebody took a shot at you with a pellet gun,” he remarked. Didn’t seem too surprised. It is St. Louis, after all. Later that evening, I…
